China can only buy oil from the Middle East, or any other ocean-dependent source, because it is not engaging in armed hostilities with the US. The US has no such constraint.
Apart from the fact that if you piss off the people who sell you the stuff you need to buy, they may stop doing that.
And unrestricted commerce warfare is a really good way to piss people off. Especially if it's against their biggest customer.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
But actually, I wasn't thinking so much about the oil producers as about the merchant marine. The US directly controls a fairly small share of the global merchant marine. And there's a difference between being able to blow up a ship and being able to take it over in a useful condition. Tick off enough of the rest of the world's maritime nations through unrestricted commerce warfare and you will find yourself unable to find civilian shipping for your own needs.
I guess I'm thinking that the merchant marine is basically like any other business. Ship owners, when they are not a government, have real fortunes and savings invested in them and stand to lose a lot if someone wrecks a boat, and crew members have even more to lose. (Ship insurance doesn't cover acts of war, generally, so the owners have a lot of skin exposed in such situations.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt many ship owners, flagging their vessels out of Liberia and Panama as the vast majority of ships are, are going to risk putting their investments in harms' way if the world's big boys came to blows, which means that the only way they could continue to pay their loans and bills is to sail them with non-Chinese cargo. To me it looks like the very market forces that allow China to benefit now, would act completely the opposite if the risk level of doing business with Chinese cargo increased. Risk gives advantages to those with the greater power, or biggest guns, all the more so when you can't afford to idle your capital (or labor) as most ship owners are.
